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Legendary

From Diablo Wiki

Legendary (AKA "leg") items are the (potentially) highest quality items in Diablo 3 and Reaper of Souls. Legendary items are orange in color and announce themselves when dropped by 1) creating a loud *clang* sound effect, 2) sending up a beam of orange or green light, and 3) creating a star or asterisk icon on the minimap. Set Items are another type of legendary item and act just the same, except their beam coloration is green and they appear as an asterisk * on the minimap.

Legendary gear (legendary or set or crafted) is designed to be the top quality of gear in Loot 2.0 (the system operational in D3v2 and Reaper of Souls)[1]. Back in Diablo 3 vanilla, rare items could spawn equivalent or better than legendaries in many slots. This is no longer true and Legendary items are now always better at the top end, when found with a good combination of affixes on the item.

Most characters wear a mixture of rare and legendary gear while leveling up, but once they reach the end game at level 70, the goal becomes finding or crafting legendary or set items for every slot, since legendaries have higher potential stat rolls, special legendary affixes, and set bonus properties that make better than any Rare items can possibly be.

Legendary items in Reaper of Souls and D3v2 are all Bind on Account and can not be traded, sold, or given away except to other players who were in the game when the item was found, or for up to 2 hours after the game ends. (The legendary trading exception.)

Ancient Items were added into the game in Patch 2.1.2 after extensive testing on the PTR. These are level 70 Legendary Items with a special "Ancient" designation which grants higher values to most of the affixes on the item, including the damage roll on weapons. Ancient Legendary Items can be big upgrades over non-Ancient versions of the same item since they will have higher values to most affixes, but ancient items are not guaranteed to be better since they might not roll with ideal affixes for a specific character or build.

Ancient items look identical when the drop; there is no way to tell if an item has rolled ancient until it is ID'ed. Once identified, Ancient items have an orange border (green for set items) around the outside of the item tooltip, and say "Ancient" in the item name.

The odds increase on higher levels of Torment, from around 1.5% on Torment 1 up to 10% on Torment 6 (from monster drops).

It's not yet known how the odds of an item being ancient are set for Gambling or Crafting, since if they were tied to difficulty level, players would just create Torment 6 games to do their gambling and crafting.

One major point of debate concerning Ancient Items during their PTR testing was the varying utility by item slot. An ancient item of the same type with good affixes was always a big upgrade, but since Ancient items are as random as all other items, in the game, they were more or less likely to be useful depending on the item slot.

Ancient weapons were the most useful, with guaranteed much higher damage than on any non-Ancient item.

Ancient Armor was sometimes a big upgrade, with potentially much higher rolls to mainstat and vitality and resistance, but with so many potential affixes on armor it's quite rare to find an ancient piece with bonuses to the properties a character requires. For instance, a typical build would require shoulders with +mainstat, +vitality, +res all, and +%damage to a specific skill. A non-ancient item with all of those would never be improved upon by an ancient version of the same item with only 2 or 3 of those properties.

Ancient Jewelry is the least improved by Ancient, since most of the best modifiers on jewelry, including crit hit, crit chance, +elemental damage, attack speed, and socket, are unaffected by Ancient. The only likely boost on top end jewelry is to the +mainstat, which is nice to increase with Ancient, but is only worth a couple of hundred points to stat, and thus never worth using at the expense of any of the other affixes. Few players on the PTR testing of patch 2.1.2 were able to find ancient versions of jewelry that were upgrades over non-ancient jewelry, since players found at least 10x more non-ancient legendary jewelry items and it usually takes dozens of pieces of jewelry to find one with close to ideal stats.

There are many hundreds of legendary items, including Set Items and Crafted Items. See all of them in the huge, multi-tab navigation box at the bottom of this page. A listing of just the Legendary items by type for quicker reference:

During Diablo 3 vanilla, Legendary items had tightly-designated stat ranges, and thus fell into a clear hierarchy of quality. Players in the end game could find legendaries of level 60, 61, 62, or 63, and in almost every case the 61 legendary was better than the 60, the 62 was better than the 61, and so on. This created a system where well-geared characters knew that 90% of legendaries were "trash" even before identifying the item, since most legendary items could not roll with top level stats, and in many cases good Rare items were better than Legendaries. (And 9.9% of the remaining 10% were also trash, if they didn't roll with good random modifiers.)

Loot 2.0 reworked Legendaries in several ways, improving them across the board. (These changes all apply to Set items and crafted leg/set items as well.)

Legendaries roll with bigger/better stats than Rares. The numbers are simply larger.

Legendary affix values scale to your character level. Thus a legendary that can first drop from a level 30 target will be a great item (random rolls permitting) if you find that same item at level 50, or level 70, since the numbers scale to be appropriate for your character.

Many legendary items (including all of the best and most scarce) have legendary affixes, specially-powerful orange text properties inherent to the item that can not be obtained on other items.

The result of these changes, especially the scaling, is that all legendaries you find, whatever your character's level, have a very good chance to be an upgrade at the time.

It also means that legendary items of the same level are equivalent in value, aside from the luck of the roll and if they have a legendary affix. All the items of the same type pull from the same pool of primary and secondary affixes, with numbers in the same range, so which item is best generally depends on the luck of the RNG on which affixes spawn. And enchanting allows the player to change one affix (though not the legendary affix) to customize the gear to their purpose.

Three versions of the Death Watch Mantle shoulders at level 70 show the variety in random affixes.

Loot 2.0 added some new legendary items to Diablo 3, but the main change was the legendary scaling, which made every legendary that dropped potentially a top quality item, better than any Rare could be.

Reaper of Souls was where the real expansion of Legendary and Set Items took place though, with dozens of new items added, most of them Item Sets that can only drop at level 70, with the most powerful set as Torment-only, where they only drop on the Torment1-6 difficulty levels.

The full list of Legendary and Set items in Reaper of Souls is too large to be easily read on one page, so see it in the navigation box at the bottom of this page, where multiple tabs can hold all the content without becoming a massive scrolldown.

Legendary drop rates as of Patch 2.0.5 Reaper of Souls and Diablo 3. The increase is 15% per difficulty level above Torment 1; the actual numbers are larger than 15% since it is a cumulative bonus and is factored into the overall legendary drop rate equation.

These figures are no longer accurate, since the D3Y2 buff was made permanent. We do not yet know the exact new figures, but add +100% to everything, at a minimum. See details below:

These numbers were increased by a special community buff during Diablo 3's week-long Second Anniversary event. The buff added +100% to legendary drop rate, though Blizzard declined to explain just what that meant, and where in the item drop formula the 100% fit.

Due to popular request, Blizzard decided to make the +100% buff rate the new normal drop rate for legendaries, once the community event ended. [2]

Josh Mosquera: I come bearing exciting news. Due to the overwhelming popularity of our Anniversary buff we have decided to keep the increased Legendary drop rate once the Anniversary celebration ends. Once the buff is disabled tomorrow morning, you will find that the new base line drop rates for Legendary items will be the same as those you have all enjoyed for the last week.

Blizzard has tweaked the legendary drop rate repeatedly during testing, most notably in the "doubled it" buff noted above. The game (in D3v2 and RoS) also has a Pity Timer that ensures a player never goes more than about two hours without finding a legendary item. Travis Day spoke about it in January 2014:[3]

The fact that some people claim to go for 10+ hours without finding a legendary is not only not our intent, but should in fact be impossible. We added a system in the expansion that tracks the amount of time you spend fighting creatures without finding a legendary and after a certain period of time will slowly start increasing the legendary drop rate. Once a legendary drops for you, actual item not crafting recipe or material, we reset that timer. This is meant to be a safety net so that the random can never be too extreme to the negative end. If players are legitimately going 18+ hours and not seeing a legendary it’s possible that there are some bugs floating around that need to be identified.

And before anyone responds saying TWO HOURS IS TOO LONG! let me say that we know as time goes on and we patch content or players get better gear and find better specs that will not be the reality. Higher difficulties do in fact increase your chance to find legendary items, coupled with people playing in coop also increasing the rate that everyone overall finds items, etc. Our final target is roughly in the 90 minute range for advanced players. This doesn’t factor in crafting items, trading with friends in coop or any of the other means that we already know players can use to accelerate their legendary acquisition rate.

A comment the next day confirmed that the pity timer does not run all the time and can not be exploited by standing in town. It only counts when players are triggering "could have dropped a legendary" events, such as killing monsters and opening chests.

First the clarification, the timer system that works behind the scenes is meant to be exactly that, behind the scenes. No you can’t afk the system, there are a lot of moving pieces to it and we talked about it extensively before we implemented it to guarantee its not exploitable. At it’s heart Diablo is a game about slaughtering demons and getting random cool rewards. The system that is in place should never be experienced by 99% of the population, it’s there for the 1% who just get really bad random rolls for an excessively long period of time. If we want you to get a legendary every 2 hours, the system basically says “ok it’s been like double/triple that period of time, just help the guy out!”

Magic Find is present in D3v2 and RoS, but much decreased in value, post-D3v. Only 10% of a character's Magic Find value is applied to the legendary drop rate, so a character with 50% Magic Find would only gain a 5% boost to legendary finding. Furthermore, in the Loot 2.0 system, Magic Find is very rarely found as an item bonus, is no longer granted by leveling up or via Paragon Points (it was in the Paragon 2.0 system during development, and during the Reaper of Souls beta test)

This is a major change from the first 2 years of Diablo 3, when Magic Find was of huge importance. During D3v, most players felt that 300% Magic Find was required for a decent legendary drop rate, and well geared characters with high Paragon levels aimed for 400% or more. This was not hard to obtain with sufficient play time, since each Paragon level granted a 3% bonus to Magic Find and Gold Find. The total Magic Find from equipment + Paragon levels was hard capped at 300%, but additional Magic Find added by Monster Power, Fortune Shrines, multiplayer bonuses, and Nephalem Valor added to the gear bonus with no hard cap limitations.)

See the Magic Find article for more details on changes to that property over time.

Some items drop more often than others. This was true in Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, and it's always been true in Diablo 3, though the developers have never shared the exact stats or weighting. That changed to a considerable extent in early May 2014 when Diablo.IncGamers.com revealed the weighting for each legendary item, revealed via datamining by a Korean gaming site.

The full list of more than 500 items is far too large to include in this page but can be viewed in forum posts:

Smart Drops:
The odds are only relevant for smart drops. Most item drops in Reaper of Souls are smart drops, in which only the appropriate item types and specific items will drop for each class. For instance, a Wizard will only find boots from item sets the wizard can use, and not from sets designed for other classes. Not all drops are "smart drops" and about 15% of all item drops are completely random. This means any class can potentially find any item or legendary item.

The item drop odds have been tweaked many times in patches, and the overall odds change each time additional legendary items are added to the pool. Even aside from specific items being made more or less likely to drop, the total number of possible items changes the odds. For a hypothetical example, if there were 8 legendary boots (including set boots) that could drop for a Monk, each boot would have a 1/8 or 12.5% chance of dropping. If a patch added two more legendary boots that could drop for a monk, each boot would then have a 1/10 or 10% chance of dropping, thus making any specific boot slightly harder to find even while the total amount of legendary boots seen by that Monk remained constant.

All legendary items are weighted to drop as a % of the items of that type. The game first selects a type of item for a legendary drop, then picks which item of that type will drop. If a Smart Drop (about 15% of all drops are not smart and are totally random) then the weighting is applies to determine which of the items of that type will drop.

Gambling with Blood Shards is always "Smart" and characters will never get random legendary items that way.

Prior to Patch 2.1.2, all items were weighted as 1/1, 1/2, 1/5, or 1/10 odds to drop from a Smart Drop. The following items were all the rarest, at 1/10th chance of dropping. This was relative odds to other items of that type. See the Hand Crossbow drop odds in the table to the right for an example. Calamity was weighted at 1/10, Natalya's Slayer and K'Mar Tenclip were weighted at 1/2, and all the rest were 1/1 (There were no hand crossbows set to 1/5 drop rate.)

The following items were all the rarest to drop, all set to 1/10th rarity, prior to Patch 2.1.2, which boosted all the drop rates of these items to the next tier at 1/5. (One exception: The Star of Azkaranth was initially set to 1/50 drop rate, the only item with such scarcity in the entire game.)